Can art help us get through (and bear witness in) hard times?
The Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts (aka FQA) thinks so. A new example is the just-published issue of FQA’s journal, Types & Shadows, (aka T&S) online right now, right here.
T&S was launched in 1996, the new issue is #101, for Autumn 2024. In its pages you’ll find stunning color photography, striking poetry, a historical Quaker novel excerpt and arts reporting.
For a long time, Friends shunned the arts (more on this here, in FQA‘s free online pamphlet Beyond Uneasy Tolerance ).
But today the arts seem to be thriving among us.
This is always good news. (An archive of earlier T&S issues back into the 1990s is here.) But it could be even better in hard times. In 2017, FQA sponsored a project, “The Art of Fearlessness,” as a response in a similarly turbulent period.
Is it true that ”What goes around, comes around”?
Here’s an answer from author Toni Morrison (not a FQA member, but an inspiring elder):
This is precisely the time when artists go to work.
There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity,
no need for silence, no room for fear.
We speak, we write, we do language.
That is how civilizations heal.
FQA was founded in 1992 by Friends in New Jersey (more on this here), but today its members are found across the USA and beyond, and Types & Shadows is open to all.
New readers are welcome. And we’re looking for new material — there will be another issue in three months or so.